In the next few years Serbia will invest 900 million euros in environmental protection measures within its coal-based electricity generation, in order to resolve the issues with particle pollution and desulfurization of flue gases, said Serbian Minister of Energy and Mining Aleksandar Antic.
Speaking at the “Green Economy of the Region” conference, Minister Antic said that there had been a lot of efforts to make coal-based electricity generation more environmentally responsible, with nearly 400 million euros invested in various environmental projects in the thermal sector, adding that the segment had been considerably improved.
He said that that two thirds of Serbia’s electricity is produced from coal, which makes it especially important to make the production more environmentally responsible and enable a greater share of renewable energy sources. Therefore, Serbia aims to have as many new RES projects and around 550 MW of new installed capacities from RES had been introduced to the network in the past few years.
He also said that Serbia had great potential when it comes to energy efficiency and emphasized that strong energy efficiency measures could decrease energy losses.
However, all this depends to a large extent on regional cooperation and the dialogue with the EU, where various scenarios in different states need to be considered, along with different economic aspects, different degrees of development, the need to adapt this process to the Western Balkans, Minister Antic concluded.
